The tenth anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone. It is one of those shared moments that each of us remembers differently. I was putting on my running shoes. The television happened to be on.  I  called my friend and told her a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. She started to ask where we were going meet for usual 45 minutes of exercise. “Turn on your television,” I told her and for the next 45 minutes we watched together,...

It’s sometimes the simplest things that trigger a memory. Ask Bobbi A Chukran who grew up in grapevine, Texas on fried chicken and turnip greens. She says, “My paternal grandmother was a sharecropper’s daughter. When I was growing up, so many of my stories have that Southern feel to them. Deep down, I feel lots more Southern than I do Texan, even though I was born here. My childhood was all about putting out trot-lines for...

My aunt collects “life stories.” She used to work for the Daughters of the American Revolution Library—the one on the Mall in Washington D.C. The stories were too short or not considered important enough to catalog except in her closet. She has hundreds of them that average five or six pages. What does a person put down in 5-6 pages to represent a lifetime of living? The pages dwell disproportionately on little kindnesses. One woman was...